It is a very common notion to define the group people based on their race and ethnicity but it often leads to completely wrong perception and assessment of the group of people. This is exactly what happens with the conventional definition of Hispanic identity. In order to fully understand how the concept of ethnicity has been constructed in Latin America it is important to start with some historic background. The formation of what will be known as “Hispanic Identity” started centuries ago when Portuguese and Spanish colonists arrived to the South America and started to oppress, enslave and exploit populations that had lived there for eons (Wade, 2003). In addition numerous African slaves have been brought in, especially in places like Caribbean and Brazil where today the significant part of the population is black (Ferreira da Silva, 1998).
Because of the melting pot relationships a significant portion of populations got mixed and were called “mestizos”. This mixing occurred between ingenious populations, Europeans and of course African slaves (Wade, 2003). This mixing created a very interesting phenomenon when it comes to Latin America namely the fact that ethnic and racial composition of many countries is extremely diverse and not homogenous at all especially in places like Brazil, Chile, Mexico and others.
However at some point even this has changed as the new approach was to define populations based on the culture rather than on ethnicity (De la Cadena, 2000). This was taking place first in Peru in regard to the ingenious populations. Another argument was that it was not very helpful to use racial/ethnic model of the US when talking about Hispanic identity mainly because it is so diverse and could not easily fit into the conventional definition (Wade, 2003).

The sentiment expressed above is the exact reason why it is problematic to define Hispanics